Showing papers in "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 2014"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use an analytic of assemblage to examine the practices that make up land as a resource, focusing especially on the "statistical picturing" devices and other graphic forms that make large-scale investments in land thinkable, and the practices through which relevant actors are enrolled.
Abstract: The so-called global land rush has drawn new attention to land, its uses and value. But land is a strange object. Although it is often treated as a thing and sometimes as a commodity, it is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away. To turn it to productive use requires regimes of exclusion that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses and users, and the inscribing of boundaries through devices such as fences, title deeds, laws, zones, regulations, landmarks and story-lines. Its very ‘resourceness’ is not an intrinsic or natural quality. It is an assemblage of materialities, relations, technologies and discourses that have to be pulled together and made to align. To render it investible, more work is needed. This Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Plenary Lecture uses an analytic of assemblage to examine the practices that make up land as a resource. It focuses especially on the ‘statistical picturing’ devices and other graphic forms that make large-scale investments in land thinkable, and the practices through which relevant actors (experts, investors, villagers, governments) are enrolled. It also considers some of the risks that follow when these large-scale investments land in particular places, as land they must.
491 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors draw together recent literatures on the geography of experiments and the potential of experimental modes of conducting science and politics and examine their implications for environmentalism in the Anthropocene.
Abstract: This paper draws together recent literatures on the geography of experiments and the potential of experimental modes of conducting science and politics. It examines their implications for environmentalism in the Anthropocene. We differentiate between two different conceptions of an experiment, contrasting the singular, modern scientific understanding of an experiment with recent appeals for deliberative public experiments. Developing the concept of wild experiments we identify three axes for critical enquiry. These relate to the status of the nonhuman world as found or made, the importance afforded order and surprise in the conduct of any experiment and the degree and means by which publics are included in decisionmaking. We then illustrate the potential of this framework through a case study investigation of nature conservation, critically examining efforts to rewild and de-domesticate a polder landscape and its nonhuman inhabitants at the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. This is a flagship example of the wider enthusiasm for rewilding in nature conservation. In conclusion we reflect on wider significance and potential of these wild experiments for rethinking environmentalism in the Anthropocene.
158 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse how life is stuck together and pulled apart in the British domestic garden, drawing on life history interviews and ‘show me your garden’ walking tours with experienced gardeners.
Abstract: In response to the pressing need to re-constitute the ways we live with non-humans, more-than-human geography's distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on ‘certain subjects’ but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that ‘we’ are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provides an everyday ethic that can accommodate more-than-human difference. I do this by analysing how life is stuck together and pulled apart in the British domestic garden, drawing on life history interviews and ‘show me your garden’ walking tours with experienced gardeners. The article is aligned with a widening bestiary of companion species in geography, and considers the appearances and disappearances of a domestic monster: the slug. Therefore in contrast to existing literature the paper explores gardening's darker aspects. First, I describe how slugs and gardeners are ‘sticky’: joined together by shared histories, curiosity and disgust. The paper then shifts to examine how gardeners practice detachment: distancing themselves from the act of killing slugs but yet avowing the violence of their actions; acknowledging the limits of their capacities to bend space to their will and imagination; recognising the vulnerability of slugs, and being transformed by that recognition. The analysis shows first, that the emphasis on gathering together and relationality obscures what lies outside relations, and second how detachment emerges not as the negation, but as an enabling constituent of more-than-human ethics. In conclusion the paper argues for looser mappings of relationality and ethics that attend more fully to the distance between species.
139 citations
TL;DR: This study is the first to use sequencing techniques to construct individual neighbourhood histories and demonstrates that the socioeconomic composition of the neighbourhood children lived in before they left the parental home is strongly related to the status of the neighbourhoods they live in 5, 12 and 18 years later.
Abstract: The extent to which socioeconomic (dis)advantage is transmitted between generations is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. However, few studies have investigated whether there is a spatial dimension to this intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. Drawing on the concept of neighbourhood biographies, this study contends that there are links between the places individuals live with their parents and their subsequent neighbourhood experiences as independent adults. Using individual-level register data tracking the whole Stockholm population from 1990 to 2008, and bespoke neighbourhoods, this study is the first to use sequencing techniques to construct individual neighbourhood histories. Through visualisation methods and ordered logit models, we demonstrate that the socioeconomic composition of the neighbourhood children lived in before they left the parental home is strongly related to the status of the neighbourhood they live in 5, 12 and 18 years later. Children living with their parents in high poverty concentration neighbourhoods are very likely to end up in similar neighbourhoods much later in life. The parental neighbourhood is also important in predicting the cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods over a long period of early adulthood. Ethnic minorities were found to have the longest cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods. These findings imply that for some groups, disadvantage is both inherited and highly persistent.
121 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined the structure of welfare spending in Britain and its geography, the nature and rationale for the welfare reforms and cuts, especially the stress on "fairness" and the social and geographical impact of the benefit cap.
Abstract: Welfare spending is currently a key element of government expenditure in western countries and it has grown considerably since the Second World War. But there have been calls for cuts in spending that have intensified since the onset of the financial crisis and the stress on austerity. This has been associated with a shift in the nature of welfare policy to what has been termed ‘workfare’, where benefits are increasingly means tested, time limited or financially capped and contingent on recipients seeking work. This shift has been seen in Britain since 1997 but has intensified since the election of the coalition government, who have instigated the most radical reshaping of welfare policy since 1945. The paper argues that geographers should pay more attention to the geography of welfare spending. The paper examines the structure of welfare spending in Britain and its geography, the nature and rationale for the welfare reforms and cuts, especially the stress on ‘fairness’, and the social and geographical impact of the benefit cap. It argues that the cuts point to a re-orientation of the welfare state and pose political problems for the Opposition, given the shift in social attitudes to welfare.
89 citations
TL;DR: This article examined how the routines and repetitive interactions of everyday school life shape the capacities of parents to live with difference and examined the shared parental commitments and aspirations that underpin the motivations for intercultural dialogue and learning.
Abstract: In the UK, schools are considered vital to the realisation of intercultural cities, to the strengthening of community relations and to the development of new forms of social learning. This paper brings work on the geographies of education and learning together with work on the challenges of living with difference, to examine how the routines and repetitive interactions of everyday school life shape the capacities of parents to live with difference. Utilising research with white British parents at a multicultural primary school in Birmingham, UK, the paper builds on the growing interest in the spaces and theories of urban encounter to extend work that has examined the value of shared school spaces. While attending to the (re)production of social difference and the problematic accounts of anxiety, hierarchy and belonging that fracture the school community, the paper also examines the shared parental commitments and aspirations that underpin the motivations for intercultural dialogue and learning. In so doing, the paper details how existing knowledges and ways of living are called into question and gradually altered through personal work, pragmatic negotiation and the development of practical competencies and calls for much greater emphasis on these small and incremental changes in future work.
70 citations
TL;DR: The authors revisited the emergence of this distinctively liberal moral geography to show how a modern form of "humanitarian reason" developed in concert with the rise of capitalism and the liberal state, and sketched out the implications of this by examining some of the ways that contemporary humanitarianism fulfils this role with respect to issues of global order and capital accumulation.
Abstract: Images of catastrophe and the suffering of others form an important part of the contemporary western imagination. Such images trace the geography of an uneven world at the same time as they assert the moral and political horizons of liberal forms of care towards it. Drawing upon Foucault's notion of political rationality, I revisit the emergence of this distinctively liberal moral geography to show how a modern form of ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2011) developed in concert with the rise of capitalism and the liberal state. In particular, I explore the processes that, during the course of the long 19th century, invoked both a market-driven moral economy and a state-driven political morality within humanitarian endeavour. The final part of the paper then applies these reflections on humanitarianism's past to its much-debated present. I move away from what is sometimes a rather binary focus on humanitarianism as a problem of Western intervention in other spaces to draw attention instead to its strategic function as a ‘liberal diagnostic’: a recursive moral practice that helps constitute a liberal politics as much as it projects that politics onto other people and places. I sketch out the implications of this by examining some of the ways that contemporary humanitarianism fulfils this role with respect to issues of global order and capital accumulation.
69 citations
TL;DR: Urban exploration is a practice of researching, rediscovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas within built environments without permission to do so.
Abstract: Urban exploration is a practice of researching, rediscovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas within built environments without permission to do so. Drawing from four years of ethnographic research with a group of urban explorers in the United Kingdom who undertook increasingly brazen forays into off-limits architecture, this paper argues that while urban exploration can be connected to earlier forms of critical spatial engagement, the movement also speaks to the current political moment in unique ways. Urban explorers are one of many groups reacting to increased surveillance and control over urban space, playfully probing boundaries and weaknesses in urban security in a search for bizarre, beautiful and unregulated areas where they can build personal relationships to places. The results of this research both complement and complicate recent work within geography around issues of surveillance, subversion, urban community building and critical engagement with cities.
68 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that culture and creativity have been rendered technical in relation to the invention and circulation of a number of interlinked global forms, such as the "creative industries" and the "Creative class", which are embedded in abstract, placeless, technical systems that provide them with an apparent universality.
Abstract: Culture and creativity have been increasingly instrumentalised in policy programmes worldwide in recent decades. This has been associated with the rapid development of techniques for quantifying and measuring the sector. This paper argues that the development of these techniques has been central to the mobility of policies and policy concepts that instrumentalise culture and creativity. Using Ong and Collier's notion of global assemblage, it is argued that culture and creativity have been rendered technical in relation to the invention and circulation of a number of interlinked global forms, such as the ‘creative industries’ and the ‘creative class’, which are embedded in abstract, placeless, technical systems that provide them with an apparent universality. How this is achieved is examined in detail through a discussion of the work of a London-based consultancy specialising in cultural knowledge. The consultancy helps to produce this assemblage by doing the work of producing technical, calculative measures of culture and creativity that translate a messy social world into a set of ordered, rationalised representations that can be compared to similarly produced representations from elsewhere. Their work helps to convert topographical connections between places into topological relations across which appropriate global forms can move with relative ease.
67 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a processual view of mapping reveals the extent of mutability of OSM, and highlights many of the tensions evident in collaborative remapping, which may also reify power relations.
Abstract: It has been argued that crowd-sourcing offers a radical alternative to conventional ways of mapping, challenging the hegemony of official and commercial cartographies. In this view mapping might begin to offer a forum for different voices, mapping different things, enabling new ways of living. Instead of Latourian notion of the map as immutable mobile, fixing knowledge and bodies and facilitating governance, the wikification of mapping might facilitate a more mutable politics. This paper focuses on these possibilities by examining OpenStreetMap (OSM), arguably the most significant and emancipatory of neo-geographic assemblages. While not underplaying the importance of a political economic understanding of the Geoweb, it suggests we need to attend more to the contexts through which emergent knowledge communities enact alternatives, and that notions of practice are central in any evaluation of changing politics of representation. Communities involved in OSM contest the geographies that they call into being, and this process can be narrated through a consideration of local action, in different map spaces and places. A processual view of mapping reveals the extent of mutability of OSM, and highlights many of the tensions evident in collaborative remapping. New ways of mapping reciprocally create and reinforce newly expert knowledge communities that may be emancipatory, but that may also reify power relations. Crowd-sourced mapping is likely to comprise a hybrid of mutable and immutable elements.
67 citations
TL;DR: In the UK, the established approach to biodiversity conservation concentrated on spatial strategies of territorialisation to secure particular outcomes in relatively small pieces of land, set aside as protected areas as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Biodiversity conservation is a fundamentally spatial practice. For more than a century, conservation's leading strategy has been the establishment of protected areas. Governance by the state has been central to conservation's claim to territory. In the UK, the established approach to biodiversity conservation concentrated on spatial strategies of territorialisation to secure particular outcomes in relatively small pieces of land, set aside as protected areas. However, this strategy has begun to change, and conservation's expanding territorial claims have been expressed through new models of large-scale conservation. A series of projects developed by non-governmental conservation organisations seek to extend conservation management over larger areas of land. In this paper we consider these developments as a form of re-territorialisation, a reframing and extension of conservation's spatial claims. We describe how conservation's ambitions have been reformed and extended and discuss evidence on the growth of large-scale biodiversity conservation projects in the UK. We then consider the implications of these changes in the light of the neoliberalisation of conservation.
TL;DR: In this article, the origins, rise and consequences of environmental governance initiatives in Palawan Island, the Philippines, facilitate forms of governmentality that intersect with, and rearticulate through, the local political economy to influence swidden-based livelihoods, social relations and landscape composition.
Abstract: Environmental governance initiatives increasingly extend to the rural Philippines as ‘devolved’ programmes that progress livelihood change, differentiation and market-based investments. This paper examines how the origins, rise and consequences of environmental governance initiatives in Palawan Island, the Philippines, facilitate forms of governmentality that intersect with, and rearticulate through, the local political economy to influence swidden-based livelihoods, social relations and landscape composition. Drawing on recent scholarship, I describe how the rise and substance of this governance agenda manifests spatially as a form of discursive green governmentality. I argue that this scaled, discursive process involves diverse institutions that decentre and deploy technical knowledge, values and rules in local spaces, influencing how farmers self-govern their behaviour and use of nature toward ‘sustainability’ (Goldman 2001). I draw on a case study to show how Tagbanua swidden farmers negotiate such green governmentality by adopting new landscape ideals through anti-swidden narratives inflected by local politics, economy and environmental change in villages around the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. I focus on how green governmentality has become systemic across scales to converge with local politics and economy, where governmental discourse is pliable, flexibly interpreted, though followed to affect the shift from long fallow to permanent cultivation. I conclude by showing that the ways government, non-governmental and local actors communicate and invest in such discourse facilitates convergence with the local political economy, reinforcing swidden decline, livelihood risk and marginalisation.
TL;DR: Negative governance as discussed by the authors is an idea that describes a unique and specific modality of governance and a way to think about the concept of governance in general, and negative governance is a system of governing paradoxically predicated on the withdrawal of all positive procedures of state and a delegation of power to those forces outside the state's capacities.
Abstract: This paper develops the concept of negative governance, an idea that describes (1) a unique and specific modality of governance and (2) a way to think about the concept of governance in general. In terms of the former, negative governance describes a way of governing that works by refusing to govern. This refusal is not simply a denial of state provision (since this assumes a governing agent), but a denial of state management. Negative governance is a system of governing paradoxically predicated on the withdrawal of all positive procedures of state and a delegation of power to those forces that are by definition outside the state's capacities. It governs by allowing ‘life itself’ – life in all is chaotic unpredictability – to rule. In terms of the latter, negative governance raises questions about the origins of governance. Specifically, it asks ‘what is it that calls for governance?’ My answer is that the ‘call to govern’ emanates from a place wholly outside the state and the state's own representational logic. Expanding upon Levinas’ concept of the elemental, I argue that the state is not the agent that makes subjects vulnerable. On the contrary, vulnerability is a human condition: the body demands food, our loved ones come and go, death is always present. It is this basic vulnerability that calls for governance. And government is a response to this negative condition.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyse the complex entanglements of young people's lives with international politics and develop a relational conceptualisation of citizenship, showing that youth citizenship across and beyond national borders evolves from specific lines of connection and disconnection that are actualised and modified in performances of citizenship identities, giving rise to diverse political positions and dissent.
Abstract: This paper brings a relational perspective to studies of citizenship beyond national borders. Analysing the responses of 16 to 19-year-old young people in Bradford (UK) to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we demonstrate the complex entanglements of young people's lives with international politics and develop a relational conceptualisation of citizenship. Departing from the scalar logics and universalising assumptions upon which many definitions of cosmopolitan citizenship are based, we show that youth citizenship across and beyond national borders evolves from specific lines of connection and disconnection that are actualised and modified in performances of citizenship identities, giving rise to diverse political positions and dissent, both with the state and between young people. We conclude with some suggestions for translating these ideas into youth citizenship practices.
TL;DR: In this article, a case study of the city of Pforzheim in southwest Germany is presented, where the municipality signed a number of derivative contracts with Deutsche Bank, aiming to limit interest payments.
Abstract: The global financial crisis is complex and uneven. This paper focuses on the propagation and mediation of the crisis via a case study of the city of Pforzheim, in southwest Germany. In 2004 the municipality signed a number of derivative contracts with Deutsche Bank, aiming to limit interest payments. However, since the early days of the crisis these contracts have produced heavy losses. Attempts to restructure them (involving the world's largest derivatives dealer JPMorgan Chase) compounded losses. This study explores the making, unfolding, interpretation, negotiation and contestation of this crisis, enabling wider critical analysis of state-finance relations across the bounded spaces of local government, through transnational firms and intersecting varieties (and scales) of capitalism.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore how notions of "modernity" are performed and enacted through the exclusionary practices of elites and non-elites alike, and examine how the state-led urban modernisation agenda simultaneously draws upon and re-inscribes a set of interlocking popular geographic imaginaries.
Abstract: State-led urban development projects, especially in non-democratic settings, are conducive to a top–down analytic that focuses on state planners and architects. The goal of this article is to explore how we might decentre this narrative and jointly consider elite and non-elite narratives, through an analysis of discourses of modernity as enacted in and through these statist urban projects. Deploying a practice-based analytic, I explore how notions of ‘modernity’ are performed and enacted through the exclusionary practices of elites and non-elites alike. Taking the case of Kazakhstan's new capital city, Astana, I examine how the state-led urban modernisation agenda simultaneously draws upon and re-inscribes a set of interlocking popular geographic imaginaries (Soviet/modern, urban/rural, north/south), and demonstrate how ordinary citizens are not just passive spectators, but active participants in the political drama of state- and city-building.
TL;DR: How diverse disabilities intersect with academic careers, lifestyles and workplaces is explored, focusing on some common disciplinary and institutional spaces of human and physical geography.
Abstract: This paper considers the experiences of 75 university-based human and physical geographers who define themselves as disabled. We explore how diverse disabilities intersect with academic careers, lifestyles and workplaces, focusing on some common disciplinary and institutional spaces of human and physical geography. We identify two self-selecting groups of geographers who participated in our research. First, we discuss the experiences of those geographers who are active and politicised in relation to their disabilities, and have worked to effect inclusionary change in their institutional and disciplinary spaces. Second, we highlight the less ‘hopeful’ experiences of geographers with mental health conditions that are undisclosed in workplace contexts. We suggest that these data should prompt reflection on the institutional and disciplinary spaces we inhabit and constitute: especially how (to quote one respondent) spaces of academia may be ‘conducive to poor mental health … [i]t is practically the norm to be sleep-deprived, working until the early hours, behind with deadlines, underpaid, on short contracts, full of caffeine and alcohol.'
TL;DR: In this article, a group of individuals for whom geographical identity is both terrestrial and littoral in constitution is studied, and the effect of this mobility on surfer identity is discussed.
Abstract: Geography emphasises the spatial influence on human identity; however, this influence is often seen as exclusively terrestrial in nature. This paper focuses on a group of individuals for whom geographical identity is both terrestrial and littoral in constitution. It introduces how surfers’ identities are not only defined by the terrestrial co-ingredience of the shores that support their surfing activity, but also by the littoral space of the surf zone itself. However, due to advances in transport, communication and surf forecasting, surfers are increasingly global in their search for waves. The paper goes on to demonstrate the effect of this mobility on surfer identity. It outlines how mobility dislocates surfer identity from its ‘surf-shore’ moorings and produces in its place a routed but rootless ‘trans-local’ surf identity. The paper examines the tensions and contradictions that arise between these spatially divided surfing practices before commenting on how surfers’ shared affiliation to the littoral zone may offer the potential to reconcile them.
TL;DR: This paper explored the link between the impacts of AIDS and young people's livelihood prospects, focusing on the ways in which young people respond to both the immediate sustenance requirements of themselves and their households and their need to accrue assets for future livelihoods.
Abstract: In recent years, anxieties have been expressed that the impacts of southern Africa's AIDS pandemic on young people today will damage their future livelihood prospects. Geographers have been remarkably reluctant to explore young people's future livelihoods, inspired by a concern to view young people as human beings, worthy of study in their own right rather than mere human becomings, of interest only as 'adults in the making'. Yet there is growing acknowledgement that young people, like older people, are always both 'being and becoming'. The connections between current and future lives merit much greater attention, both because experiences and actions in childhood and youth undoubtedly shape the futures of individuals and wider society, but also because young people's thoughts and actions are so often geared to the future, and this future orientation shapes their present worlds. This paper reports on research that set out to explore links between the impacts of AIDS and young people's livelihood prospects. Intensive case study research was undertaken, combining participatory methods and life history interviews with young people aged 10-24 in two villages, one in southern Malawi and the other in the mountains of Lesotho. By theorising a temporal dimension to de Haan and Zoomers' concept of livelihood trajectories, the paper focuses on the ways in which young people respond to both the immediate sustenance requirements of themselves and their households and their need to accrue assets for future livelihoods. Some young people's trajectories appear to be disturbed by the influence of AIDS, but with no systematic patterns. Beyond addressing empirical questions concerning the impacts of AIDS, the paper contributes to our understanding of how livelihoods are produced and to the conceptualisation of youth transitions as produced through the iteration of present and future. © 2013 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the settlement layout in the West Bank is not just an aggregate of 124 legal gated communities and a similar number of illegal outposts, but rather a single contiguous gated community gating, in turn, Palestinian 'islands' within it.
Abstract: The claim that the settlements in the West Bank are gated communities might seem trivial. Those settlements are an explicit example of a community featuring, on the one hand, social cohesion based on shared values, while, on the other hand, self-isolation with the help of fences and a stress on the ‘security of the community’. The argument of this paper, however, is different. The paper suggests that the settlement layout in the West Bank is not just an aggregate of 124 ‘legal’ gated communities and a similar number of ‘illegal outposts’, but rather a single, contiguous gated community gating, in turn, Palestinian ‘islands’ within it. The reading I will offer seeks to look at the space in question through a careful reading of its use values. The emphasis is put on the question of mobilities in order to show how the fortressed points turn into an exclusionary web by means of separated roads and movement restrictions. By analysing the combined system of settlements, roads, military legislation, spatial design and applied violence, the paper shows how the few hundred points consolidate into one coherent spatial system. The paper wishes to contribute to the spatial analysis of the now 45-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank, to the growing study of politics of mobility and to the discourse of gated communities by adding colonialism and violence to the mostly neoliberal explanations of the phenomenon.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that stewardship should remain an important concept for understanding rural cultures, landholder practices and the politics of land, and they use Anderson's idea of critical domestication to underpin this analysis.
Abstract: Rural stewardship has been a focus of much natural resource management policy in Australia and elsewhere. Despite landowners professing stewardship, some researchers have cast doubt on the utility of the concept due to its vagueness and difficulties of associating attitudes with behaviour. In contrast I argue that stewardship should remain an important concept for understanding rural cultures, landholder practices and the politics of land. Stewardship, however, needs to be understood as emergent, as a ‘dwelt achievement’, as having temporal depth and as being part of the production of socio-natures. Moreover, as a key vernacular practice, its capacities and vulnerabilities require critical interpretation. I pursue these issues through an analysis of 20th-century pastoral stewardship in central Australian rangelands where land-use ideals have long been tested by aridity and low productivity. Arid zone pastoralism has also been subject to on-going critique and re-evaluation as ecological and other values challenge pastoral practice and the very presence of pastoralism. Pastoralists have responded with varying articulations of stewardship. These share consistent foundations even as their form changes. I use Anderson's idea (1997) of ‘critical domestication’ to underpin this analysis and show that pastoral stewardship has been, and continues to be, characterised by interpolations of order and chaos in nature and of continuity and discontinuity. With its focus on humanist ontologies of human distinction from the natural world rather than specific land-use ideals, critical domestication provides a framework for critically interpreting these interpolations in landscapes where ideals such as cultivation and closer settlement have not been achieved. Allying this framework with recent perspectives on the agency and materiality of nature, I also show that stewardship is not solely a human achievement, but is co-produced by environmental variability, plants and domestic and feral animals such as cattle and rabbits.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the fashioning of the nation through these salons is thus cosmopolitan in style: orientated outward, embracing the modern and privileging a sense of worldliness and affinity with distant people and places.
Abstract: Feminist scholarship on emotion and the ‘global intimate’ offers innovative ways to rethink nationalism as embodied, affective and lived in the everyday. This approach also brings into focus the significance of the transnational: flows of commodities, bodies and ideas that cross state boundaries and are taken up, reworked, celebrated and worried over as part of nation-making. I approach nationalism here in this way, centring the beauty salon industry in the newly independent Republic of South Sudan. Beauty salons are owned, staffed and supplied by inherently transnational subjects: migrant workers and entrepreneurs as well as members of the returning diaspora. They are also stocked with transnational material objects: hair weaves, cosmetics and beauty technologies from across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the USA. The fashioning of the nation through these salons is thus cosmopolitan in style: orientated outward, embracing the modern and privileging a sense of worldliness and affinity with distant people and places. However, this styling of nationalism is ambivalent and contested. Clients clamour for new fashions, the latest technologies in hair and beauty, and the know-how brought by migrant ‘saloonists’, as they are referred to in the region. Yet this desire interweaves with a growing panic around the foreign: foreign styles, migrants, capital and commodities. Through this case study I argue that nation-making in South Sudan is fundamentally transnational – constructed not in isolation from, but explicitly through, cosmopolitanism and the modern exterior. In connection I argue that nationalism is emotional – marked at once by contradictory feelings of fear and desire that require, and indeed depend on, a foreign other. In this way I demonstrate how quotidian spaces and subjects, transnational flows of bodies, commodities and styles, and analyses of emotion can all be richly explored to better understand and theorise the operations of nationalism.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take a geographical perspective on the living wage and argue that there is a scalar dimension to making the argument for a living wage that can help to inform the future direction of the campaign.
Abstract: Drawing on new empirical data from the UK, this paper takes a geographical perspective on the living wage. It highlights the extent to which the living wage is a geographical intervention to tackle in-work poverty that reflects the cost of living and social reproduction in a particular geographical area, aiming to set a new minimum across the labour market. The paper further argues that there is a scalar geography to understanding the impact of the campaign and the arguments made to defend it. Whereas the living wage has major cost implications for the particular employers and clients affected – increasing wages by approximately 30 per cent above the national minimum wage – it also has the potential to reduce costs across the wider society. There is thus a scalar dimension to making the argument for a living wage that can help to inform the future direction of the campaign. The paper concludes by raising some wider questions about the contribution that geographers can make to the study and alleviation of poverty.
TL;DR: In this paper, the arc of sound is defined as a socio-material approach to semiosis able to recognise the ways sound connects and differentiates contingently across heterogeneous spaces and materials.
Abstract: Drawing on the example of Chris Watson’s soundwork El Tren Fantasma, this paper considers how landscape is made in sound. Informed by the work of Michael Serres and Don Ihde it argues for an understanding of landscape as mediation. Drawing on the work of Brandon Labelle, Jean Luc Nancy. Mladon Dollar, and Charles Sanders Pearce , the paper develops the concept of ‘the arc of sound’ as part of a socio-material approach to semiosis able to recognise the ways sound connects and differentiates contingently across heterogeneous spaces and materials. It shows how sound participates in the production of the railway corridor as a complex, animate and deeply contoured historically and geographically specific experience of landscape. Finally, it argues for an approach to landscape as mediation which pays equal attention to ontology and epistemology.
TL;DR: In this article, a more-than-human cosmopolitanism model for elephant conservation in India and the UK is proposed, where animals become participants in forging connections across difference through their circulation, becoming cosmopolitan, present in diverse cultures and serving banal global consumption.
Abstract: Cosmopolitanism has emerged as an important concept in geography and the social sciences. The rise of mobility, circulation and transnational networks has been paralleled by academic scholarship on un-parochial others: diasporas, travellers and itinerant social groups. However, the role of nonhumans as participants in and subjects of cosmopolitanism has received scant attention. This paper seeks to develop a ‘more-than-human’ cosmopolitanism that accounts for the presence of nonhuman animals and entities in stories of circulation and contact. Through a multi-sited ethnography of elephant conservation in India and the UK, the paper illustrates how animals become participants in forging connections across difference. Through their circulation, elephants become cosmopolitan, present in diverse cultures and serving banal global consumption. The paper then illustrates how cosmopolitan elephants may be coercive, giving rise to political frictions and new inequalities when mobilised by powerful, transnational environmental actors. It concludes by discussing the methodological and conceptual implications of a more-than-human cosmopolitanism.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated whether returned international volunteers with a strong belief in the need for global governance also believe that participation in national political and civic spaces can drive global change.
Abstract: This paper informs the active global citizenship debate by assessing whether returned international volunteers with a strong belief in the need for global governance also believe that participation in national political and civic spaces can drive global change. Regression models use survey responses from 245 returned international volunteers at three points in time. Findings indicate no significant difference in volunteers' conceptions of global citizenship before and after international service. However, volunteers who hold cosmopolitan views about the need for global governance have a higher sense of efficacy that participation in national spaces may affect global change. In addition, they are more likely to engage internationally but not locally. Findings suggest that global citizens may maintain an active civic identity rooted in overlapping locations. In addition, heightened notions of global citizenship appear to have a significant effect on returned volunteers' interest in international affairs and active engagement across national borders.
TL;DR: In this article, a detailed analysis of men's experiences within one form of health care setting, drug treatment programmes, drawing on qualitative data from participant observation and interviews at multiple treatment sites, is presented.
Abstract: Health geography has largely failed to engage with the topic of masculinity. This absence is surprising for several reasons, not least because health geography has close ties to social geography, where a burgeoning scholarship on masculinity has developed in recent years. In this paper, we contribute to what Thien and Del Casino () envision as a more robust health geography for men. We do so through a detailed analysis of men's experiences within one form of health care setting, drug treatment programmes, drawing on qualitative data from participant observation and interviews at multiple treatment sites. Particular attention is given to understanding the ways in which the delivery of health care is dependent upon treatment programmes’ ability to problematise masculinities associated with the heavy consumption of drugs and alcohol, while concurrently showing men how to practise an alternative model of healthy masculinity. These objectives are accomplished through the structured domesticity of treatment programmes and through intensive relational work aimed at reworking the masculine self.
TL;DR: In this article, the role of social memory in determining adaptability and resilience within the Makushi social-ecological system (SES) in the Rupununi, Guyana was examined.
Abstract: This research looked at the role of social memory in determining adaptability and resilience within the Makushi social-ecological system (SES) in the Rupununi, Guyana. Secondary data was used to construct a timeline based on different phases of the adaptive cycle and a compendium of narratives was created through participatory video interpreted as coherent social memories. These revealed a range of discourses linked to different aspects of Makushi SES viability over time, indicating that the main constraints to the adaptive capacity of the current Makushi SES include historical evolution of the SES, livelihood/resource dependency and the role of institutions. This suggests that efforts to ensure the sustainability of the Makushi SES need to focus on keeping a balanced repertoire of at least one discourse capturing behaviour in each phase of the adaptive cycle so as to maximise Makushi adaptability and resilience in what are rapidly evolving times, both ecologically and socially.
TL;DR: In this article, a case study of a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, suggests that non-representational theory offers advantages in studying spaces like malls for two reasons: first, shopping malls offer an opportunity to study the engineering of affect that is central to this emerging literature on materiality, politics and technology.
Abstract: As shopping malls have become increasingly common in urban and suburban landscapes, retail and consumer sciences have made these spaces more affectively intense by targeting the body of the consumer directly. Through a case study of a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, I suggest that non‐representational theory offers advantages in studying spaces like malls for two reasons. First, shopping malls offer an opportunity to study the engineering of affect that is central to this emerging literature on materiality, politics and technology. The analysis, then, will lead to a discussion of the mall’s capacity to function as a biopolitical technology as well as an economic one. Second, this approach sutures a false binary in the consumption literature between strong theories of producer power and the creativity of consumers. Interviews with mall visitors, participant observation and findings from ethnographic field work inform the figure of malls without stores (MwS), an analytic concept adapted from Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs (BwO) that reconfigures a binary reading of the consumption literature and expands the purview of what is political about these spaces.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the role of memory performance in participatory mapping in indigenous communities, in particular in terms of driving radical action for territorial rights, and suggest that greater critical consideration should be given to participatory maps as process, as opposed to participatorial maps as products, in the current push for land, resource and territorial rights among indigenous peoples in Venezuela and beyond.
Abstract: This article examines the role of memory performance in participatory mapping in indigenous communities, in particular in terms of driving radical action for territorial rights. By examining the links between memory performance, processes of identity formation and the social constructions of landscape, the article suggests that greater critical consideration should be given to participatory mapping as process, as opposed to participatory maps as products. This is particularly important in the current push for land, resource and territorial rights among indigenous peoples in Venezuela and beyond. The article is based on a participatory mapping project conducted with indigenous residents of the Yukpa community of Toromo in the Sierra de Perija, Venezuela, in the years 2007–2011. The mapping process inspired the speaking of memory, which in turn articulated with autochthonous debates regarding land rights and development strategies. By drawing on Ricoeur's conceptualisation of memory and narrative identity, the article presents and critically analyses memory performances of violence, exile and deceit, which reflect memory themes constitutive of a ‘duty to remember’ and ‘a duty to map’ so often expressed by Yukpa.